More by Marilyn

The logic of your chicken-and-egg answer escapes me. [November 17, 2013] If an egg is defined by the creature it contains, then the creature is logically primary to the egg, not the other way around. In reality, when the almost-chicken laid (or actually, at the time that it developed internally) an egg with a chicken in it, the chicken and the egg came into being simultaneously. Your reasoning seems to assume that a chicken is not a chicken until it’s hatched. But a chicken is just as much a chicken in the egg as out of it.

Marilyn responds:

I can’t agree with your first point (about the creature being logically primary to the egg) because the chicken-and-egg question is temporal, not logical. But I think your second point (about the development of an egg with a chicken in it) is good except for the fact that if we look this closely, we must consider that the egg exists (without a shell) before it gets fertilized, so one could argue that the egg still comes first. Or are you going to say that an egg isn’t an egg until it has a shell?!